Sharing hand gesture and sketch cues in remote collaboration

Abstract

Many systems have been developed to support remote guidance, where a local worker manipulates objects under guidance of a remote expert helper. These systems typically use speech and visual cues between the local worker and the remote helper, where the visual cues could be pointers, hand gestures, or sketches. However, the effects of combining visual cues together in remote collaboration has not been fully explored. We conducted a user study comparing remote collaboration with an interface that combined hand gestures and sketching (the HandsInTouch interface) to one that only used hand gestures, when solving two tasks; Lego assembly and repairing a laptop. In the user study, we found that (1) adding sketch cues improved the task completion time, only with the repairing task as this had complex object manipulation but (2) using gesture and sketching together created a higher task load for the user.